Winter Feeding, Winter Nesting - Sutherland Staatz (unputdownable books .TXT) 📗

A pigeon sky hung above my colony. It was the kind of sky that hid us well. It was so perfectly diffuse and gray that it was a part of the better colored buildings. It was the kind of day that wrapped you up and made you safe, not that our colony ever had anything to fear. Little birds, sea birds, and even those clever black ones only amounted to minor food competition. Even those hordes of mammals that usually occupied the under-story only fed us.

So it was puzzling to me when the roosting pipe started to feel a little more spacious. There had hardly been any jostling for a better position in the past month. Sure, some pigeons leave for other colonies or find part of a building to make their tomb, but the pipe was always crowded before now.

It was on that same safe pigeon-sky day that the answer presented itself. If I’d blinked, I would have missed it. It was a streak of a bird, faster than any bird I had seen, faster than anything I had ever seen. It was even faster than those obnoxious beasts the under-story mammals rode around in. The bird tore out of that soft comforting sky and into a pigeon on the wing.

I watched the quick-bird take the pigeon up to the roof of the neighboring building. I was baffled. Birds catching other birds … on the wing? How was that possible? I noticed one of the older pigeons nearby and hopped over to him.

“Did you just see that?” I asked.

“See what?” he replied blankly.

“That bird just grabbed a pigeon right out of the air!”

“So?”

“What do you mean, so? If something can just grab us from the sky… well, how do we escape that? What do we do?” I earnestly was hoping the other pigeon had an answer, or was leading me, in a round-about way, to an answer, making me figure it out for myself.

“If something can nab us out of the sky, there‘s nothing to do. Now, if you don‘t mind, I‘m going to look for some food and a hen before it gets dark.”

I guess he wasn’t that old. I needed to find someone with more on his mind than hens and mammal scraps.

#

My attempted inquires all failed. Not one other bird in the colony seemed the least bit concerned with anything out of the ordinary.

Food, hens, and sleep: it's all scavenge, roust, and court... hmm, court... The hen! I courted a hen a while back. She should be sitting on eggs by now. That should give a bird plenty of time to think.

I flew down to the old rust-spotted shed in the breezeway, squeezed through the small hole to the loft and looked around to get my bearings. This was the hatching place of most of the birds in the colony. This wasn't a place that you go to unless you're a hen with some eggs to lay. The place smelt of droppings and dander; there was no smell of mammal food or promising sea wind to burst into. But, according to the hens, it just felt right.

I spotted the hen I’d mated with in a good nest with more paper than dung. One of those mammals must have cleaned the place up before she made her nest. Out of habit I puffed out my chest as I approached her. She got up and started to hop away.

"Wait!" I said.

"Wait, nothing. I'm trying to hatch some eggs here! Shove off."

"No, I didn't mean to court. I need to ask you something."

She turned around and gave me a curious sideways look with one of her eyes.

I had to just blurt it out before her curiosity turned to annoyance. "There is a bird. It's taking us from the sky. I don't know what to do about it. No one else is interested in doing anything. I thought that maybe you could think something up on your nest."

She blinked at me. "Think?"

"Yes, think; there must be something we can do. I mean it's grabbing us right out of the sky! I've seen one of the mammal's little companions kill a bird once, but not while it was in the air! This thing kills in the air! How does someone escape that?"

"Well this is the third chick I've hatched this month. If this one gets it there'll be others." she said before she settled back down on her nest, her back facing me.

#

So that was it, the last bird in my colony had only empty headed retorts for me, and after that wonderful time early one morning I had with her on that window sill before that crazy mammal banged on the glass and nearly cut us off before I was finished fertilizing.

There were more pigeons of course, other colonies close by, a stray group might show up and compete for some especially good mammal spill; but the birds from the other colonies seemed very much like the birds from my own, always repeating those basic two tasks: mate, eat, mate, eat over and over again, with complete disregard to anything else; it was ridiculous! But then that's not all pigeons did, there was some talk- mostly about where the next meal was coming from- however the occasional peace of gossip did make its way into day-to-day chatter. It was the rumors about that colony that made its home on a peculiar roof that had my interest. An abnormal roof just might make for abnormal pigeons, pigeons with perhaps some ideas that could be coaxed out of them.

#

The strange building that the other pigeons whispered about had a slanted roof. It was so incredibly slanted that I was surprised to see the pigeons could indeed stand on it, but there they were just the same, packed onto it, more than I'd seen in any other colony. The only bare spot was a second roof with an even more ridiculous slant that was topped off in what would have been a handy perch had the surface of the perch not been covered in spikes- the whole thing was a testament to the mammal's absurd way that they did things. The whole thing struck me as so odd that I momentarily forgot about the monstrously speedy bird as I approached the colony: I saw no place that these birds could place a nest, and yet there was hardly a place to land on the roof.

I was almost over-whelmed upon landing, there were so many birds surrounding me. I began to wonder how this many pigeons could even feed themselves but then it occurred to me I could just ask one of the birds. I shuffled around, wedging myself in between pigeons on the moving roof until I found an older pigeon that might have some answers to my greater and lesser questions.

"Good day" I said in greeting.

"Good day?" The other bird looked at me inquisitively out of one eye in much the same manner as my hen had.

"Err, I mean hello, I'm new here." I stammered in reply while struggling to remain near enough to the old bird to retain a conversation while fighting the current of birds on the roof.

"Hummm, I can tell." I could have sworn that he raised an eyebrow in a mime of a human expression.

"How's that?" I replied.

"Pigeons here usually don't have much use for small talk, the mammals below hand out so much food that there isn't much need for coordination. Everyone just eats and breeds." The old bird said.

I suppressed a comment about it being much the same in my own colony and decided to cut to my driving question since the old bird had answered my question about this colonies 'culture.' "I guess that might work out for you guys for now but there is this small gray and brown bird that can rip a pigeon from the sky! It's been feeding off of my colony for a while now and-"

The older pigeon cut me off. "What one pigeon at a time?" He scoffed at my question and moved out of the way of a couple in the midst of courtship. I was a little perturbed at his response, single pigeons were important weren't they? Maybe there was something wrong with him, there is usually one or two odd birds in every colony; maybe if I kept looking I could find someone both smart and sane.

Unfortunately after an extensive search and questioning the other pigeons of this strange colony provided very typical responses to all my inquiries. They shrugged and told me of the nests in their near-by tree in the same manner that they shrugged the invincible bird off. They'd say "We're comfortable, chicks hatch every day, there is plenty of food here, why should we care?" Exasperated I flew back to my colony.

#

Unlike those pigeon-chicks of the slanted colony that were being hatched relatively safe trees or my own chicks in that safe, smelly shack I was hatched in a nest on a window sill. It was a very unusual and dangerous place to be hatched; the mammals have a bad habit of clearing nests on window sills, with or without eggs in them. I'm sure the nest couldn't have lasted long on that ledge. I might have been the only bird raised there. The colony had to have been crowded that year to have forced my mom to pick that sill. No hen in her right mind would have nested there if there was much of an alternative. For all the danger that came with being raised so close to those unpredictable mammals it was interesting to watch them through the window.

Some scenes turned from interesting to violent rather quickly. On one occasion after the male mammal had successfully courted a young female a second male entered the dwelling. There was enough shouting to frighten my mother off, but I could not fly so I was forced to watch the outlandish scene of violence unfold before me. The shouting rapidly devolved into tossing and then blows. They fought each other as I've never seen birds fight over a mate. Blood was drawn and, as they pummeled each other, the room was torn to shreds, the things in this glass bowl of chaos were rendered useless as they rendered each other limb from limb. They didn't stop when one was seriously wounded like any sensible bird would when one was clearly the victor. They had to be dragged apart by other mammals in blue with the female rubbing an arm in silence in a corner.

Some of their other more peculiar behaviors I still remember and imitate just to try and find some use in the various acts. Pacing is the odd behavior that I decided to try today.

Pacing looks like the courting dance, but the mammal I saw growing up did it alone. I resigned myself to the activity on the edge of the colony's lower building, away from the other birds. The other pigeons were not interested in the problem, or at least solving it. So it made sense to mimic the mammals: always running about, sometimes for food or each other, but sometimes for no reason at all.

So